


The Facts in the Case of Pearson Hardman v. the Apocalypse

by sterlinglee



Category: Suits (TV)
Genre: Gallows Humor, Gen, Gore, Harvey is a badass, Mike not so much, Zombie Apocalypse, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-31
Updated: 2013-08-31
Packaged: 2017-12-25 06:05:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/949524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sterlinglee/pseuds/sterlinglee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the senior partner vote, Jessica and Harvey are ready to fight tooth and nail to oust Daniel Hardman.  But as it turns out, the zombies do it for them.</p><p>In which Mike is too stoned to notice the coming of the zombie almost-apocalypse, and Harvey takes to non-metaphorical skull cracking about as well as you might expect.  Which is to say--way too well.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Facts in the Case of Pearson Hardman v. the Apocalypse

**Author's Note:**

> Full warning: I began writing this on library catalog cards, and it does not pretend to be anything but ridiculous and kind of splashy.

Mike Ross was always learning, even when he wished he didn't have a brain at all (much less a wunderkind freak brain). It was kind of a side effect of being him, along with the poor life choices and the tendency to disappoint everyone he loved. The two most important things he learned in the flu season of 2012 were:

a) The problem with vaccines wasn't that they made autistic babies, or whatever. It was that tainted batches did something new to human DNA, something no one had expected. Worst case scenario, the stuff killed you. But it wouldn't let you _die_.

b) The CDC's zombie preparedness plan was not a goddamned joke, it was a godsend. But it wasn't enough.

\-----

"Hooooly— _ohmygod!_ " Mike flailed backwards from his door as sixty-four-year-old Rosalia Sanchez lurched forward and tried to bite his face. She smelled putrid; fiercely organic and _old_ , as if her flesh was protesting the fact that it still had to move around this long after its time. The reek cut nicely through the pot haze that enveloped his apartment.

He skipped back a few steps and heard his bowl, mostly empty now, roll across the floor. His late neighbor paused, looking around in confusion for the source of the sudden noise. 

"...You're not the pizza guy," he said, into the few moments of confused silence. He had finished the last of the pot less than an hour ago, floating on hazy memories of smoking with Harvey. God, he had been hungry. Now, not so much.

Mrs. Sanchez lunged for him again, snarling. Her voice was a hissing bubble in the back of her throat—what was left of her throat. "Holy shit. Holy _shit_." It wasn’t riveting, as opening statements went—Harvey had told him that you should make even a handshake introduction into an attack, if at all possible. He ducked below his neighbor’s tattered, reaching arms and grabbed his bike pump. It was a foot-and-a-half rod of painted steel, and it was the only remotely weapon-like thing that he owned.

Mrs. Sanchez' crucifix necklace was lodged by one hard point into the spongy flesh at her collar bone. As she kept coming, it dislodged itself and swung loose, dripping gore. Mike whimpered, shut his eyes, and swung the pump. Things cracked and spattered. Mrs. Sanchez was quiet.

Mike dared to open an eye. His neighbor, who had once yelled at him for not going to church regularly and who was now a zombie, swayed on the spot. She was trying to fit her bashed jawbone back in place, with limited success. Some of the splatter had got on Mike's shirt.

They regarded each other silently, Mike through a steadily receding haze of drugs and Mrs. Sanchez through the oozing albedo of the one eye that remained to her. She grunted. He yelped, and smacked her in the head again, much harder. This time, the steel bar punched through old, softening bone, and Mrs. Sanchez went down.

When he finished throwing up, he turned on the TV with trembling hands and realized that he had been too high to notice the arrival of the zombie apocalypse.

Well. The TV still worked, and it seemed like his building's backup generator had kicked in. He was picking up a couple news stations, and the radio was giving him a sex chat show based in Hoboken. The world was mostly still there. But Mike had watched movies, and read books, and he was pretty damn sure that when a good portion of the Eastern Seaboard was overrun by the living dead, you could call it an apocalypse. Or the start of one. The important thing here was that the world as he knew it had ended. 

At some point he had tumbled down from his high and into sheer living terror. The hall was empty, but something wicked had quite obviously come this way—and passed. Either that or a really avant-garde group of street artists. 

When he leaned out the window, he heard wet snuffling and snarling from down below. The alley below the fire escape was full of ragged, sluggish bodies, turning and bumping against one another. The reek had bile rising in his throat again, and he tugged the hem of his t-shirt up over his nose as he shut the window.

Taking a couple steps back from the window, Mike tipped his gaze up at the ceiling, breathing shallowly through his nose. Okay. He had defrauded one of the biggest law firms in Manhattan. He was Harvey Specter's right-hand man. He had outmaneuvered Louis Litt and avoided serious mauling by Jessica Pearson. Hell, the flesh-eaters in the street were only slightly more literal than the ones he worked with on a daily basis. He, Mike Ross, could handle this.

Luckily, he made it to the toilet before throwing up again. After a few last dry heaves, he slid down by the bowl, ass on the cold tiles, clutching the bike pump to his chest. It was sticky. He whimpered for a little while, and realized he was grateful that his Grammy had passed away before—this. He wondered briefly if that was a really awful thing to think, and then decided it was permissible under the circumstances and a jury would probably let it slide. 

He whimpered a little more, his breathing harsh and squeaky. His foot fell asleep. Time shuffled past—half an hour? More? At some point it got a little easier to breathe. Then he unfolded himself from beside the toilet, his mind filled with a strange, fragile clarity, and went to go see about his resources.

Exhibit A in the rapidly unfolding case _Mike Ross v. the Legions of the Undead_ : one bicycle pump, hand-operated, smeared liberally with Mrs. Sanchez. Not much of a weapon, but familiar, at least.

Exhibit B: The contents of three kitchen cabinets, including several ounces of instant coffee, a box of Cheez-Its, two boxes of cereal, and assorted canned soups. The fridge was nearly empty, but there was half a Diet Coke and a bag of baby carrots. The bread bag was empty except for the two end slices, because he didn’t like end slices.

Exhibit C: The freezer was a goldmine. At least, in comparison. Hot Pockets, frozen waffles and pizzas, a dozen bagels Jenny had convinced him to buy and freeze for later. Some vegetables, too, and a stupid kiddie ice pack shaped like a baseball that nearly brought him to tears thinking about Grammy again. 

Shakily, he shut the freezer and lowered himself onto the couch, propping the bike pump at his side. He was going to die. He knew that, in a sort of crystalline, far-off way. He had a bike pump and a bunch of Hot Pockets and goddammit, all the weed was gone and he was going to have to die sober. That gave him pause. If he hadn't been so exhausted, it would have made him angry. There was nothing he could do to soften the impact of his own advancing end, he had never even seen Rachel with her clothes off, he wouldn't ever get to one-up Harvey and—

Harvey. Oh God, Harvey, was he even alive? And Rachel and Donna and Louis—Harold too, if he was being generous. He probably didn’t need to worry about Jessica. A tremor ran through him, from the nape of his neck to the base of his spine. Not just him. They could be dead. They could be dead too and hadn't enough people died on him by now?

When he finally found his cell phone under the couch cushions, there were twenty-three missed calls and ten texts waiting for him, and he had to have been really shamefully high to ignore that. Rachel, Harvey, Donna, Jenny. The best closer in New York had had to call him eight times. 

If he were still stoned that'd be hilarious, or something. Now it just made him want to cringe. He sat with his phone in his hand for a few heavy minutes before diving into his contacts.

_"You've reached Harvey Specter of Pearson Hardman. Leave a message, keep it short and—"_

"Mike, what the _hell_."

"Harvey," something dull and ugly crumbled in Mike's chest, and he breathed it out, letting a rush of relief take its place. "You're alive."

"God, nothing gets by you, does it? Except for the fact that _I've been calling. Dammit, Mike, I thought—" Was he imagining it, or did Harvey's voice falter ever so slightly? _

"Never mind. Where are you? At home?"

"Y-yeah. You?"

"The office, everyone's here. Stay where you are, can your genius brain process that simple instruction? Just pack it up— I'm coming to get you." Yeah, he wasn't imagining it; there was a roughness riding the bottom register of his boss' voice. "Mike?"

"Harvey—God, I'm so sorry, I just—I was being stupid, okay? Are you..." He had done his whimpering, he was supposed to be finished with the whole nervous breakdown part and taking his fate into his own hands. But, God, a familiar voice. He sucked in a deep breath.

Harvey seemed to know what he meant. "I'm fine," he said, almost gently. "So's your pretty paralegal, and Donna too. Pearson Hardman's the place to be right now. So just hang tight. And quit being stupid, it doesn't work on you." He hung up, then, and Mike gripped the phone hard, feeling his own pulse beating in the crook of his thumb. At this moment, people he knew were alive, and they knew where he was and that he was alive. There was something there to tie him to the outside world.

In the next hour he tore through his apartment in a flurry, filling an old backpack with clothes, bottled water, and all the food he thought he could safely carry. Sounds filtering up from below made him freeze in shock, before unclenching and going back to work. He draped an old sheet over what was left of Mrs. Sanchez. His muscles were getting sore and tense from repeated scares, and he still kind of wanted to curl up on the bathroom floor and hyperventilate. But they were coming for him, and he was going to get out of here.

The next time Harvey called he picked up on the second ring, wondering if it was too late to get religion. Maybe Grammy would have been able to help with that. His heart was hammering, his hands sweaty and shaking. "Yeah?"

"You still in that rat trap? How bad is it?"

"It's, uh, it's pretty quiet from what I can tell. I mean, the old lady in 3b tried to eat me a couple hours ago. But I bashed her. So. No one else so far. All quiet on the...apartment front? _Godthatwasawful_. Sorry."

"Save it," Harvey told him, but he didn't sound mad. Just as though his mind was elsewhere. Since that _elsewhere_ happened to be saving Mike's life, Mike decided to cut back on the panic-induced babble. "I need you to do a little scouting, make sure we aren't walking into something we won't walk out of."

Research. Mike could do research, wasn't that what he always did? Read the situation. Find the loopholes and the blind spots, so Harvey could turn then from liabilities into weapons. That thought strengthened him.

"The fire escape's a no go," he told his boss, almost calm. "The, uh. The zombies, they're packed into that back alley. I checked the hallway. I don't know where my neighbors are." He slipped the phone, still on, into his pocket, and hefted his bike pump. "Stay on the line. I'm going out."

Harvey hissed something he didn't catch as he stepped up to the threshold of his apartment. He really, _really_ didn't want to leave. As long as he stayed inside, it wasn't quite real, the idea that his city was overrun by monsters. That maybe the pot had been laced with something extra and the only mistake he'd made was to put on _28 Days Later_ while he smoked. Slowly, he pushed the door open. 

The hallway stank—he had been a little too out of it to notice before, but now the smell of decay, wet and immediate, assaulted his senses. It was a small mercy that he hadn't eaten anything since Mrs. Sanchez. Feeling his head fill with pressure, a deep roaring in his ears, Mike stepped out into the dimness. Under his feet, things squished. His own breathing suddenly seemed very loud.

He made his way down to Mrs. Sanchez' apartment, where the door had been half torn from its hinges. Bloody handprints trailed down the chipping paint. There was a story there that he didn’t want to know.

After a few moments' hesitation, Mike slipped into the ruined apartment. The faded drapes had been dragged from the window and strewn across the floor, contributing to the general impression that a hurricane had passed through. There was a lot more blood, and some...pieces. He tried not to look too closely. Had Mrs. Sanchez had a cat?

From this apartment, he could get a slightly better view into the street below—he craned as far out the window as he dared, trying to peer around the corner of the building. At the street corner, in front of the wrecked newspaper stand, within bloody and abandoned glass storefronts, the dead wandered.

From this relatively safe vantage point it was a little easier to not crumble into a sobbing, emotionally devastated shell of the man he had once been. There were eight or so zombies shambling around in his field of vision, their clothes and hair in disarray, their bodies graying and taking on the soft misshapen look of old meat. There was also an arm lying on the curb below the sign that prohibited weekend parking between the hours of 11 PM and 4 AM. Mike took a steadying breath, carefully, through his mouth, and backed away from the window.

Further down the hall, he failed to meet anyone—anything—else. A relief, not only because he was pretty sure the building super would have tried to tear rabidly at his flesh even before the outbreak. Bike pump held high at his shoulder, Mike dug the phone from his pocket. "Harvey?"

"What've you got?"

"My floor's clear, as far as I can tell. I'm gonna check out the stairwell, see if I can hear anything on the second." He had thought a third floor apartment was a good deal when he had taken the place. Now it just seemed like a long, long way up. Harvey made a soft noise of agreement.

“Be quiet. Try to stay alive.”

The door to the stairwell didn’t give when he turned the handle. After a few moments of panicked deliberation, he tucked the pump under one arm and levered his weight against the door, leaning hard on the point of his shoulder until he felt something shifting on the other side. The door scraped open on the landing, and a mottled, dripping hand scrabbled out from behind it to snatch at Mike’s ankle.

An undignified noise escaped his mouth before he really even knew what was happening, and the phone in his pocket buzzed with the faraway sound of Harvey’s voice. Raised in urgent questioning—the fingers dug in with terrifying, hungry strength—Mike gagged—

Through his terror, he gripped the handle and slammed the door hard towards the wall. The thing trapped there gurgled and convulsed, and a fresh gout of blood pooled at the tops of the steps. He got a glimpse of yellowed, rolling eyes before he sucked in a rattling breath and rammed the door back again.

The fingers wrapped around his ankle twitched, and loosened. Flesh gave, and bone splintered. He shook the hand away. His breath was rasping in and out. He leaned out into the stairwell and looked down, feeling something like vertigo well up in his gut and whirl behind his eyes. The off-white paint was streaked generously with rusty dried blood, but he saw nothing and no one else.

The phone was still buzzing angrily, and as he lifted it to his ear he heard the tone of voice Harvey usually reserved for _I needed those briefs in yesterday, what are you even doing with your life?_ Well, not the exact same tone—this one was laced with something too superior, too distant and expensively tailored and _Harvey_ , to be fear. But it was kind of like that anyway.

“I’m okay. Just a—it’s okay. It’s clear, I think. I took care of it.” The words wouldn’t come. Mike didn’t realize he was panting until he heard his own gasps bouncing back tinnily in the speakers. “The back stairwell is clear. It comes out on the west side of the building, next to the dumpster with the dick graffiti. Can you get there?”

“I’ll find out. Hang tight, Mike.” Footfalls over the phone. A heavy swish-crack that Mike didn’t recognize. He adjusted his grip on the pump and waited. Harvey’s words settled on him, repeated—hadn’t he said that before? _Hang tight_. Like he was dangling in space, only stubbornness keeping him from the last big drop. 

If he really listened, he could hear voices on Harvey’s end. A woman calling out, the rev of an engine. A rattle of gunfire. Then Harvey was back, breathing heavily. “Mike, get to the second floor and _find somewhere to hide_. I’m gonna be a little late.” The dial tone buzzed. Mike peered out into the stairwell again.

It looked clear, but something had to be going on down below. Before he could talk himself out of it, he spun on his heel and raced back to his apartment to get his bag. This was it.

There were things he had learned for the hell of it, but packing light was a skill he had picked up because sometimes he there was no alternative. Circumstances had taught him how to be almost-homeless, how to couch-surf with the bare minimum of possessions that kept you human. He shouldered his old backpack and took one last look around his apartment. Grammy’s panda was still on the wall. Bike pump in hand, he very pointedly did not look at it as he stepped out and locked the door behind him.

He made it down the hall without having a nervous breakdown, and spared a couple seconds to be proud of that as he stepped into the stairwell. He figured that after the preliminary shutdown and reboot, he was handling this whole “life as we know it has been laid to waste, forcing us to confront the reality of a random and uncaring universe in which we are all mortal” business pretty well. The stairwell held silent, and he listened carefully as he moved onto the steps.

No sound. Only his breath, his soft footfalls, a sluggish _dripdripdrip_ from somewhere further down—that last thing, he wasn’t going to think about. He made his way to the second floor, and poked his head carefully out from the landing. 

Like his own floor, this place was a ruin. Splatter patterns that would give forensic specialists nightmares. Splintered doors and shattered glass—it looked like someone had tried to use the fire extinguisher as a weapon. That ever-present smell hung over it all, like a haze he could just make out in the corner of his eye. If it had color, it would be a sickly gray-green. If it had voice, it would be moaning like a trapped animal.

Mike cocked his head. Wait. That was definitely actual moaning he was hearing. He wasn’t ready to say it sounded human, because wounded animals too often did sound human. The noise was guttural, and he couldn’t decide it if sounded like pain or hunger.

Still, Harvey had told him to get down here. There was a way out of all of this if he’d just suck it up. He advanced down the hallway, towards the one doorway that wasn’t cluttered with the remains of broken barricades or slicked with a disturbing amount of viscera.

It was apartment 2c, one of the nicer ones as this building went. Edging over the threshold, he realized that the moaning was louder here. A nasty jolt went through him before instinct kicked in and told him he was alone in the room—the sound was still too far away, the air in this apartment undisturbed except by his own presence. He took a few moments to steady himself, and moved into the kitchen.

Through the tiny kitchen window, he could see into the narrow cleft between the wall and the neighboring building. This was where the moaning was coming from—there was a zombie lying prone on the sloping roof of the trash enclosure, below the open window it had crawled out of. Mike mentally cheered whoever had made quick work of its leg muscles. The thing had been neatly immobilized, if you could do anything neatly these days. It didn’t make the best neighbor, but he wasn’t about to go down and give it a goodnight tap on the head either.

Leaning against the kitchen counter, he dug his phone out and thought about calling Harvey. He hadn’t seen Jenny in a bit, but her name in the contacts made him feel again the thorny ache of losing her. Trevor hadn’t called, and when Mike finally processed his absence and what it might mean, he found he was too strung out to care. He was stretched thin already with worrying about people who would pull all-nighters with him, exchange surreptitious fist bumps, care enough to get angry when he screwed up. They were enough. And he was pretty sure that keeping Trevor around would have gotten him eaten alive in the end anyway—it was just a slower process with people like him.

His phone vibrated in his hand, startling him. Turning the ringer off had been a good idea. “Harvey?”

“Yeah. You on the second floor?”

“Uh-huh. I think it’s clear—no hordes, at least.”

“Stay. Back entrance by the Dumpster, you said? I’m on my way and I’m bringing you a gun.” He hung up. He had sounded—not out of breath, but heavy, tense. Mike tried to remember the last time he had used a gun. Oh, right—that time was _never_. 

Gunfire ruptured the quiet of the street below, sending him bounding to the window to catch a glimpse. The angle was all wrong, though. At the head of the alley he spotted the bumper of a black car speeding by. Tires screeched, and a meaty impact resounded. He had the urge to duck, as if one of those unseen bullets might come rocketing through the window.

The zombie on the trash enclosure squirmed, useless legs drumming against the wall. It cocked a piteous eye up at him and he flipped it off. More gunfire. Something uncoiled in Mike’s chest, flooding him with nervousness like venom. This was happening. This was happening _now_. He moved toward the door.

As Mike crouched behind an upturned loveseat, feeling himself inching back towards mortal panic, he realized that _he_ was the dead weight character the hero’s crew risked everything to rescue. Here he was, trapped unarmed above ground level while the sexier and/or more macho stormed the keep against the swarming undead. Someone who didn’t need to die always died in sequences like that, just to show people that it could still happen.

That someone was usually the kid or the dog, wasn’t it? Like, because every choice has weighty narrative consequences and offing the kid or the dog was just so damn tragic. Problem was, Mike was pretty sure he was the useless one, the kid, _and_ the dog. He huddled behind the bad upholstery and thought for the second time that day about praying.

He had never read an instruction manual on that, either.

Then, footsteps. Not shambling and slow—a measured and familiar tread. Getting closer. Mike peered over the edge of the loveseat. “Harvey?” His voice was a harsh whisper, and he regretted speaking as soon as he had done it. The steps paused, then resumed, this time faster.

“Shh!”

Mike opened his mouth to shoot back a sarcastic response, but caught himself. Rising slowly from his hiding spot, he moved towards the door, and when he got there, Harvey Specter was there to meet him.

Harvey caught him in a rough side-hug, head low like a linebacker’s with assorted limbs and weapons tucked in close. It felt so much like an attack that Mike couldn’t look at him, couldn’t let himself see for that one moment that Harvey cared so much he had to disguise it as aggression. He just swayed on the spot, feeling Harvey’s living weight against him.

When they pulled apart, Harvey stepped back and raked Mike with that familiar look, the one that went along with his smirk and his suits and the blunt physicality of him. Announcing his intent to steamroll whatever got in his way. His lips quirked and he handed Mike what looked like a sawn-off shotgun. “I hope not having a gun license hasn’t kept you from learning how to shoot,” he said.

“I’m a quick study,” Mike told him. It was more or less the truth. And then they were off.


End file.
